Although I believe that playfulness and rule bending and rule breaking are all very noble purposes in a poem, I don't think I will incorporate any of the playfulness of language into my Lebrun poem.  Instead, I'm going to stick with structured language. All those language rule breakers came way after Lebrun, and I dare say that she would have been incapable of appreciating that aesthetic.  It just wasn't of her time.  To a Classicist like Lebrun, art was an opportunity to celebrate and recognize the ideal.  Art was created to awe its viewers and to give them a taste of perfection.

Highly structured poetry has never come easy to me, albeit, it's been awhile since I've given it a go. The three characteristics of the genre that I'm focusing on are: 1) a strictly maintained structure, including repeated line length, stanzas, and rhyme scheme.  2) Internal rhythm in the lines dictated by the rhythm of the words themselves. 3) Often playful and folksy, and can sometimes incorporate local dialects.  

I will probably inject my poem with the musicality of language by sprinkling a little French here and there, just like in my 1st person narrative part of my Lavoisier multigenre project.  I know that structure was something that was celebrated in the classical era, which Lebrun was certainly a part of, so perhaps I'll challenge myself to mimic those immaculately pruned gardens of Versailles with the structure of my poem.   

Somewhere along the way, first person narratives became my favorite genre (one of my favorite genres? Absolutes are so tricky when it comes to literature...) to read for pleasure.  There is so much to be gained from seeing the world through the eyes of another person. In the best cases, a first person narrative can teach you a new way to think about and perceive an old thing, but even in the worst cases the reader gets a free peak at the machinery of another person's mind.  I think it is always a good thing to learn how other people's minds work, even if they don't agree with you.  Maybe especially if they don't agree with you.

Nevertheless, I don't think that I'm going to include a first person narrative in my multigenre project on Lebrun.  This is because she has already written a beautiful memoir.  She has her own first person narrative account of her life, which I enjoyed very much. It would be kind of disrespectful to write yet another memoir, and my ideas of what she would think and say would clash with the actual real words that she thought and said.  So, no first person narrative.

As of now the plan is that my two prose pieces will be: 1) a third person narrative about the Greek dinner scene, including the original Seneca recipes, and 2) a dramatic scene in Lebrun's studio.  My backup piece is a fiesty letter.  Because what I am missing here is the sound of Lebrun's own voice, talking about the world as she alone sees it.  Perhaps I will save all of that for the poem....

One thing is certain- if I make a script of Lebrun's life, she's going to need to put in a few of those ruthless evaluations of different people's looks that she sprinkles throughout her memoir.  Some possibilities include:  a scene fighting with her husband about money, maybe talking to her brother about her husband, or maybe preparing for entrance into the French Academy despite protest about her sex, or maybe a fight with her daughter about that fiance she hated... Basically anything I could write a 3rd person scene about would be fertile fodder for a script.  It would be fun to incorporate some Moliere-style ridiculousness and handle some important themes really lightly, but I don't know who the fool would be... It wouldn't be Lebrun and it wouldn't be her husband.  Maybe her brother?  He seems a high-spirited type.  

I think the best one act scene would be a script where Madame Vigee Lebrun is painting and one of her friends comes to call.  This would give me a chance to 1) show her dedication and her snippiness when her work is interrupted, 2) indulge the feminist chip on my shoulder when Lebrun talks about getting into the Academy despite the opposition, 3) have some indelicate gossip about Monsieur Lebrun that reveals his gambling, 4) allude to the approaching thunderstorm of the revolution.

Lebrun was a star at seeing meaning in the ordinary.  She painted ordinary people in an extraordinary manner, and she affected the way future generations, including our own, see the people that she captured.  Whatever else my poem does, I think it definitely needs to take something ordinary and focus in on the beauty of that ordinary thing as a tribute to Lebrun.

The only problem is, very little that Lebrun did was ordinary.  She lived a glamorous life all across the greatest cities in Europe.  Everything that she recorded in her journals was extraordinary.  Like the relationship of the people of St. Petersburg with the frozen river running through their city in the icy winters.  Or the walks that she used to have around Naples.  It's very easy to see beautiful in the ordinary when you are traveling, because what is ordinary for natives is often different for the traveler.

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Every afternoon, despite her glamorous life, Lebrun would paint.  She would come into her studio, day after day, whatever city that studio happened to be in, and she would paint portraits of the people around her.  Painting was the ordinary fabric that made up Lebrun's life.  Maybe I'll write a poem about a moment when she was painting...

If I were going to include a letter in my Lebrun project, I would either a) write a letter that Lebrun could have written to her husband from abroad.  When Lebrun fled France as a refugee from the French Revolution, her husband stayed behind in Paris.  Lebrun and her husband had a strange relationship.  In her memoir, she says that her husband was basically a nice guy, but there was a big problem- he gambled away all their money as fast as Lebrun could earn it.  She spent most of her marriage separated from her husband, gamboling all over Europe with her daughter.  Also, I could write a letter that Lebrun would send to her daughter after her daughter married a Russian man against Lebrun's wishes.

I think that I am going to include a third-person narrative.  I want to write a narrative based on the anecdote that Lebrun tells of the time when she was still young before the Revolution and she was busy hobnobbing with the elite of Paris.  One night she and her brother threw a dinner party and served recipes they found in an ancient Greek text.  All of the participants dressed in Greek garb from Lebrun's studio, and that dinner became a legend in Paris society.

How could I incorporate myth into the life of Lebrun?  I think that I would have some challenges, and I'm not sure I could pull it off because of the nature of Madame Vigee Lebrun's life.  At then end of the day, she was a servant, and a servant is a tough archetype to work with.  However, she was also an artist, and artists are creators, and I LOVE CREATION MYTHS.  Creation myths are my favorite kind of myth.  And, for sure, one of the reasons I chose to research and write about Lebrun is that she is a creator.  We see so much of that time period through her eyes, which gives Lebrun a kind of power that not even her royal subjects, like Marie Antoinette, had.   

So, one option for my future multigenre project would be a myth about Lebrun, showing her as the exiled creator and forger of the images of her time.  I'm still not completely sure I will write this though- I already have a few ideas that I'm really excited about.  For my image, I want to create some kind of annotated interactive map that shows Lebrun's travels across Europe along with her best quotes about her experiences there.  Also, I know that I want to do a third person narrative of a crazy scene that Lebrun relates from her life where she and her brother had a Greek dinner party with a menu recreated from an ancient Greek text.  And, for my final piece.... I still don't know, I guess.  Maybe I will write a myth... About the way she sees the world and captures the people around her, both with her words and her paintings.  And, maybe an ekphrastic poem based on one of her paintings.  And I was also thinking about making a dramatic scene about the moment when Lebrun was made a member of the Royal Academy of Painting, despite sexist protests.  Which is probably a little more relevant to my research question and thesis.

I finished reading Madame Lebrun's memoir, and I enjoyed it immensely, which was unexpected to tell the truth.  I also believe that I have ended up answering my research question, which was:  How could a woman like Lebrun succeed and flourish as an artist in 18th century France?  After reading the book, I believe that Lebrun was so successful because of a confluence of factors: she was lucky, she was talented, and she was an extremely hard worker.  If even one of these facts was different, Lebrun never could have succeeded.  She was lucky because she was beautiful, and she captivated the popular imagination of Pre-Revolutionary France at a young age because she was seen as a prodigy.  She became and remained a fixture of the highest social stratum all her life, in every country that she lived.  If she hadn't been talented, she never could have attracted the attention of the aristocracy.  And Lebrun herself admits that some of her earliest clients were men that were trying to put the moves on her.  But all this- luck, beauty, talent, and social status would still have not been enough for Lebrun to become the famous portraitist that she did if she didn't also have her work ethic.  She painted everyday, and she recounts stories of roaring at dukes when they accidentally interrupted her in the middle of her work.  

I still need to find a couple of supplemental texts to complete my research.  I'm going to look for some of reliable articles that have information about Lebrun's career in the arts.  I'm also very, very interested in her amazing travels across Europe, travels to Italy, Russia, Germany, and Switzerland that were only half-forced by the Revolution.  It's clear that Lebrun loved to travel and explore the world.

I love a good excuse to drive down to the Houston Central Library.  By the time I got down there some Sundays ago, I had a lot of things I wanted to research.  Number one on my list was Madame Vigee Lebrun.  The only library in the entire Houston Public Library System that had any books at all on Lebrun was the 4 story central library.  They had exactly 3 books on Lebrun, and I checked out all three of them.   All three of the books were books written about Lebrun, however.  I found it very strange that the library didn't carry a copy of her memoirs, in any language. 

These books had beautiful examples of Lebrun's paintings.  Her control of light in her outside paintings is captivating to me.  However, after paging through the information presented in these biographies, I decided to buy a copy of Lebrun's memoirs.  One of the reasons that I was interested in her to begin with was because of her unique voice and her unique perspective of a slice of human social history that I know very little about that hasn't been overly filtered through a million other eyes: the aristocracy before
and after the French Revolution. 

The cover of Lebrun's English edition of her memoirs has all the hallmarks of a very, very boring book.  It is published kind of cheaply by Dodo Press, which has to be the most unappetzing name for a publisher that I've ever encountered.  But I was captivated again by her voice.  Just as she has a well-honed ability to capture the essence of a person in a portrait, Lebrun is able to capture the essence of the people who came through her life in a few well-chosen sentences.  So far, I love learning about her life and the world that she lived in.  

My research plan is to finish reading Lebrun's memoirs.  Then, after the number one voice in my head for Lebrun is Lebrun herself, I will revisit the biographies and see if there is any information there that can enrich my understanding of her life.  I'd also like to search up a few articles that zero in on interesting aspects of her: her fame, her unmitgated success, the vast amounts of money that she earned with her talent, and the even vaster amounts of money her husband gambled away, her flight from Paris during the Revolution, her descriptions of the different places she visited.  I told my students that if they could zero in on the one thing that interested them the most about their research subject early on, the research would be more streamlined and less caddywonk.  My research plan is shaping up to be caddywonk because there is so much about Lebrun's life that I find interesting.

So, I've decided that for my second mulitgenre project that I want to research Madame Vigée Lebrun, even though her name has that accent aigu that is super-hard to find on my English language keyboard.  (Anybody know any short-cuts for that, by the way?)   I first heard about her a couple of years ago when I was checking out texts that could supplement The Count of Monte Cristo.